tenthousandthings

9secondkox2 said:

macxpress said:

9secondkox2 said:

The big iMac cant come soon enough. 

The Mac mini and Mac Studio with external display added just isn’t for me. After enjoying the iMac 5k for 7 years, it’s too lame to go back to a traditional PC setup. The iMac was a beast too. 

Going 3nm, I’m betting they can use the Ultra in the 32” chassis and a 6k screen. 

The only real drawback is going to be price gouging from Apple. After pushing the Studio as a wannabe iMac replacement, apple found a way to seriously overcharge. In 2030, you could load up the iMac 27” with significantly impressive power and it was a good deal. The Mac Studio, while a nice and capable machine is a horrible deal in comparison. 

That makes me think the big iMac will be labeled “Pro” and carry the Max and Ultra chips. This will allow Apple to charge about what the Stidio plus display costs and that would really suck. 

The other option would be to limit it to pro and max and sell it for a good amount cheaper, but that would be artificially limiting the performance. No thanks. 

Hopefully it’s not too far out. By this time next year is as long as it should be. Plenty of people are losing enthusiasm as it is. No one asked for the big iMac to go away - literally the worst thing about the Apple Silicon transition. And the Mac Studio is not at all a suitable replacement. Let’s get that big iMac 6k rolling. And with m3 Ultra please. If the old iMac could accommodate the hot Intel chip and separate GPU without issue, the new one can accommodate a single 3nm SOC that runs FAR cooler and barely ever needs to use its fans as is. 

No, it's not gonna be a Pro iMac. There's no room in Apple's lineup for yet another Pro Desktop when they already have Mac Studio and Mac Pro. It simply doesn't make any sense, especially since the Mac Studio is selling so well. Why anyone would want an iMac Pro over a Mac Studio is beyond me unless you just care about how it looks. The average consumer buying a Mac Studio doesn't give a rats ass about how it looks on their desk compared to what could have been with an iMac Pro. 

You seriously need to get over this iMac Pro thing that you seem to keep pushing over and over again...I'd be extremely surprised to see it happen. It's like Apple releasing a 15" MacBook Air Pro. 

You seem to be more than a little misinformed and history-deficient. Yes, Apple already has a Mac mini. Yes they have a Studio. And yes, even a Mac Pro. They even have *gasp!* a small version of the iMac. Being that the small iMac exists, there is obviously still a major market for such sleekness. Historically, apple has had small and large iMacs - and even an iMac Pro. I know. Must be shocking news.  […]

You jump to the conclusion that the 24" iMac is a replacement for the small 21" iMac 4K, and not a replacement for the large 27" iMac 5K. But Apple exactly split the difference between the two with the 24" iMac 4.5K.

Common sense argues that this medium-sized  iMac is a replacement for both the small and the large iMac.

You are not alone in seeing the 24" size as an increase in the smaller form factor and concluding there must also then be a corresponding increase in the size of the larger form factor. But nothing in what Apple has said or done so far actually suggests this.

booga said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

r_mari said:

GPU PCIe cards will work. But someone has to write the drivers for them.  Apple won't.
[...]

It's not just drivers, it's a hardware limitation. Apple Silicon has no hardware hooks for direct writing video anything to an external video processor. At all.

Could you please explain? What do you mean by "hardware hooks"? It's up to the operating system whether to send graphics jobs to an internal or external GPU (or even just render everything on CPU). The question to me is really whether the driver interface on the OS kernel released for Apple Silicon allows a driver to divert graphics to an external GPU-- I mean, the PCIe bus is there, the CPU can still execute any instructions the OS sends to it, and send any graphics instructions over the PCIe bus. My understanding is therefore that it's not a hardware limitation, but it might be a protected-OS/kernel limitation. And while Apple publishes their XNU kernel source code and you can recompile it, I doubt anyone wants to go there for a graphics card and it's not clear to me if the CPU/GPU code is part of the published kernel. It's possible there might be some questions of whether PCIe devices have DMA access to Apple Silicon RAM so that the CPU doesn't have to do the job of pumping bits, but if it didn't, that seems like it would hurt more than just GPUs.

But I haven't exactly pored over the spec sheets or technical diagrams. What do you mean by "hardware hooks"?

I had the same question. John Ternus mentioned Apple Silicon's Unified Memory model while addressing this issue: "Fundamentally, we’ve built our architecture around this shared-memory model and that optimization, and so it’s not entirely clear to me how you’d bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems. It hasn’t been a direction that we wanted to pursue." That's probably not much help, but it does suggest the door is closed to anything that doesn't use the shared-memory model. It also sounds like that door will stay closed, and any hypothetical PCIe GPU (from Apple or otherwise) would have to conform to that.

To me, that sounds like PCIe 5, so "a few more years" as Mike's headline suggests.

Abandoning MPX isn't a negative. It's a good sign, looking ahead, not back. As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong), MPX basically added Thunderbolt to PCIe. It was a solution Apple developed for a particular problem, but (again, as I understand it) it serves no purpose with Apple silicon and PCIe 4 and Thunderbolt 4.

Also, it's probably wrong to suggest the Pro Workflows group was not consulted. The video interview featuring Anand Shimpi a while back included a manager from that group. They were consulted, and they likely played a critical role in the decision to not build whatever it was (Shimpi made it very clear in that interview that *something* was aborted), because it didn't deliver a compelling product for exactly that Pro Workflows group.

The release of this Mac Pro now may well indicate that they have had success developing the next generation and (unlike the M1 and M2 generations) the decision has been made to build it (whatever it is). So it is past the point in the process where the earlier attempts were aborted. My own uneducated guess is that it's an Apple Silicon PCIe GPU/Unified Memory extension which doubles the GPU power of the Ultra, and not the rumored 4x "Extreme" design. 

grom007 said:

I do not understand why Apple does not release the m3 MacBook Pro before the MacBook Air. It gives incentive to consumers to buy the very best.

This is how it works:

1. The first silicon out in a new generation is the A-series. This is for obvious reasons, Apple builds hundreds of millions of these for iPhone and iPad.
2. The base M-series is a variant of the A-series. It powers the consumer line (MB Air, iMac, Mini, iPad Pro) and Apple can make these in volume without missing a beat. The iPhone and the iPad pay for this. That's the genius of Apple Silicon.
3. The M-series Pro/Max (and Ultra) is a different story. There are real development costs associated with designing and building the Pro/Max (the Max is just a Pro with two GPU units instead of one, or the Pro is just a Max with only one GPU instead of two), and that development must follow the A-series and the base M-series. It can't happen the other way around. The science and the economics of fabrication don't allow it. Thus, the MB Pro, the (possible) iMac Pro, the Mini Pro, the Mac Studio, and the (probable) Mac Pro all have to wait for the process to unfold.

The economics of doing it the other way around are beyond prohibitive. No one with any knowledge of TSMC's fabs has ever suggested the M3 would appear before 2024. The iPhone Pro line will get 3nm silicon in Fall 2023, probably. But the M-series won't see a refresh until 2024. All the rumors of M3 appearing imminently are just wishful thinking. It's never had any basis in reality.

Apple has got to be thrilled with that $3200 price. Whenever the new Mac Pro is ready, there will be a new Pro Display along with it. Maybe two of them.